Before Anne of Green Gables made her a teen star, Megan Follows (above right) was known as the youngest in a family of theatre people that included actor-director Ted Follows, her father, and actor Dawn Greenhalgh, her mother. They separated when Follows was young but continued to collaborate occasionally. In the decades since, Megan has worked with various members of her acting clan, including in an all-Follows production of Noël Coward’s Hay Fever. This month, she stars as the wife of Odysseus in the stage adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s tartly revisionist The Penelopiad. Arsinée Khanjian also knows the perils and joys of working with family: her best-known roles have been in the films Exotica and Ararat, both directed by her husband, Atom Egoyan. This month, Egoyan directs her onstage for the first time ever in Cruel and Tender, by the British playwright Martin Crimp and based on a work by Sophocles. Like Follows in Penelopiad, Khanjian plays the wife of a soldier who brings his work home with him—in this case, a terrorism-fighting general who may be doing more harm than good. We invited the two to Caffe Doria in Rosedale and listened in as they chatted about mixing the personal and the professional.

“Atom romanticizes a lot of our collabo­rations, but I don’t. I never liked the idea—you become less accountable, as if your personal relationship is the thing that’s creating the dynamic and the reason for the project.”

“My mom always said she felt safe when she and my dad worked together, though things were not peaceful when they weren’t working. Like many actors of their day, they could drink a lot and fight a lot.”

“There have been moments in my collaborations with Atom that were very complicated. Shooting <em>Exotica</em> was a nightmare on a personal level because I was seven months pregnant, and here we were filming in a strip bar. While I was getting ready to have our child, he was having a baby called <em>Exotica</em>—he was there as the director, not as the expectant father.”